Oh, I forgot, they don't know. Maybe Haliburton might or the BA or better yet, the Tooth Fairy because she knows when you lose a tooth so finding something like $15,000,000,000 shouldn't be a big deal at all.

Amazing stuff here, all the more reason to stop bickering about the causes of global warming and doing something about it. Man is creating the equivalent of a Permian Extinction through gross mismanagement of the earth's resources. We are in desperate trouble yet we continue to, for the most part, act as if climate change is "a ways off" so we can continue to pollute and generate ever more greenhouse gases that will kill off the kind of magnificent animals like the Walrus and Polar bear.

As stated in a previousBRT article (click here) , the tech is there to do something about it, the question remains, do we have the will to do something about it?

Saturday, May 17, 2008

One of the most amazing books ever written, The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, stands the test of time by depicting what it was like to do acid, something this author experienced quite a number of times back in the late 60's. In addition to talking about the Merry Pranksters and the trip Ken Kesey and company take on a bus, Wolfe desscribes Neal Cassady's obsession about getting as close to the "present" as possible through gunfighting & LSD. To Cassady, matching the 1/30th of a second interval it takes to draw a six shooter from a holster gets one as close to experiencing the "present" as one can get.

In Fortress, on the other hand, language constructs such as for-next loops are parallelizable by default. The Fortress specification supports the concept of transactions within the language itself, which means that complex calculations can be computed as atomic units, independent of any other program threads that might be running.

Ah, if Sun only knew how to do interfaces, they, and not Apple, would be the darlings of the tech world.

Self powered spreadable OLED's? Yeah, Right! C'mon, this isn't possible but..."Because solar cells and OLEDs work on similar, but opposite, principles, it is possible to make materials that both take light and turn it into electricity and also do the opposite to provide a controllable display."

If this comes to pass, tech will be everywhere, persuasive to a fault.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Click on the image to see something very cool when having to go through a great deal of information to find the thing you need. Well Formed Data, the terrific site that presents this Elastic List Demo of Nobel Laureates (open source code developed by Flamenco Search) also links to Information Design Patterns, an environment dedicated to showing how to set up useful patterns (graphs, charts and layering etc., etc.) to efficiently search through large amounts of data with a minimum of hassle.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

I have a dark secret, I love trashy action movies, scifi flicks and horror films. (Techies one and all admit this without a problem.) One of the "best" is the 1992 epic titled Universal Solder starring Jean Claude Van Damme (the good guy) and Dolph Lundgren, (the bad). Seems these soldiers were chemically amped to the nth degree, fed muscular enhancements to give them super human strength and drugged to the nth degree to obey orders without question. (OBTH, They are reanimated dead guys.)

Flash forwarding to 2008, it looks like the military is doing the same thing (partially) by juicing up soldiers to deal with the extremities of war with little regard for the inevitable blowback that accompanies the use of drugs.

As per the AlterNet article, a cool $160 billion is being pumped into the program with the army taking the lead on this risky enterprise. Other tech being developed include exoskeletons, remote control unmanned aircraft and autonomous intelligent weapons. (Skynet)

A good site to see the full array of tech being developed for war is FCS (Future Combat Systems), an environment both fascinating and chilling in its intent.

Writing, a skill I took up seriously about 25 years, ago, never ceases to amaze me, especially when viewing how a very talented artist Stephanie Posavecanalyzes great writers from the design perspective.

By clicking on the Literary Organism graphic above, you will see the organizational structure of Chapter One /Jack Kerouac'sOn the Road. Other mappings depicting Rhythm Textures, Sentence Length and Sentence Drawings show, in fascinating detail, the different approaches writers take in chaining together words to communicate their thoughts to the reader. To see more of her outrageous work, go to Notcot and prepare to be blown away.